I experience Lemmy as a reflection of many of the problems in the world; there seems to be little effort to understand and respect different viewpoints. Instead of being curious about opinions one disagrees with, the community often feels almost aggressive. People end up in their own trenches. What about trying to be more open and curious about our differences instead?
Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with…
More of a rant than a genuine question. Locking.
I don’t come here for friendly debate or to enrich my worldview. It happens from time to time but there are two many bad faith actors to waste time debating with people that don’t already largely align with my priorities and morality.
Within those boundaries I’m happy to rethink things and have nuanced conversations and debate with people I already can largely agree on foundational thinking. But frankly at this point in my life if someone comes on here with “but what if Trump is good,” I block. Like in order to get to that point, there has to be extremely little common ground to agree on. There is no hope of reasonable conversation.
Likely some people feel the same about me.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean a guaranteed audience or platform.
You can write whatever you want. No one is required to read it. No one is required to host it. If they do read it, they can say whatever they want about it.
This is the fediverse. You can host your own instance and say whatever you want. No one else is required to federate with you.
If you post something and people say it’s garbage, that’s not your freedom of speech being quashed. You spoke. Now they are using their freedom of speech in response.
Give us an example what you’re referring to…your comment doesn’t mean a lot of without any context.
“Freedom of speech” is a fraught concept. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean one must accept the views of another, for example. Freedom of speech is also accepting reaction to your speech. Each speaker is “owed” whatever freedom you’re proposing.
Yeah, we’ve hand now hundreds, maybe even more low grade trolls butthurt here that they aren’t allowed to be racist sexist piles of shit and whine about free speech. No dudes, we have the right not to host your shit. Not saying OP is one of them, but I’ll throw a link at 90% of the people who post here about free speech are under that umbrella.
And every time I point it out I offer that they may start their own instance with all the hate they want. So far I have seen almost no one do that.
I’ll preface by repeating what you said: we don’t know what the OP is talking about.
But, yeah, very often when somebody is complaining about free speech…they don’t mean free speech. What they mean is that their opinion should be accepted without criticism or consequence.
What this outlook has resulted in, in many places in the contemporary western world (the world I’m familiar with), is that hate speech, aggressive speech and threatening speech are protected - even encouraged - while the speech of those functionally suppressed or intimidated is ignored or attacked.
My opinion is that conservative speech has become a huge problem. It’s ironically social media bubbles that make so-called conservatives believe that their once marginalized opinions are more popular or legitimate than they are. I believe that conservatives want everybody to be forced to listen to their opinions until they agree with them or face consequences if they don’t.
The tolerance paradox. If we let intolerant thoughts through, they quickly become domineering and push for exactly what we see. So, the only thing to be intolerant of is intolerance itself.
Welcome to
redditlemmyIt’s the karma system. People stop talking to you and start performing for an audience instead. A good dunk never changed anyone’s mind - but it wasn’t intended to. They were just hoping for applause.
Then other people see what gets applause here and what gets booed, so they tweak their takes to match. Everyone likes applause and nobody wants to be booed. And that’s exactly how an echo chamber gets born.
very few instances have it enabled. calculating it from non-home instance is a bit pointless because heavily downvoted stuff tends to be moderated out and therefore inaccessible
if you mean downvotes in general, i think that’s a very good thing, because when you disagree with something, you can just downvote and move on, and when downvotes are out, it’s a shield for trolls and assholes, and additionally when disagreeing you feel compelled to comment instead and end up like hexbear
Post scores are visible for individual replies and that’s enough to signal to people what views are okay to share and which ones aren’t.
Yeah and it’s a good signal about what each instance is like, and where to move to
Well I fundamentally disagree with that as I’ve explained above.
Also, very few people just hang on their own instance. You’re a sopuli user replying to feddit user in a lemmy.world thread. Anyone can up- and downvote you here. The choise of instance doesn’t make much of a difference.
yeah people dogpile a lot. One person disagrees, very often with a snarky strawman and gets upvoted and people take that as a cue that it’s what they are supposed to think, instead of actually thinking for themselves (but they’re totes above groupthink)
Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with…
Apparently you believe in freedom of speech – so long as nobody says ‘aggressive’ things to you.
As long as you’re not frequently getting blocked or banned, nobody is trampling on your ‘freedom of speech’. You’re free to say what you want. And other people are free to say what they they want, even if they use that to say your speech sucks. ‘Freedom of speech’ doesn’t mean people have to be nice to you no matter what you say. It just means you can say it. And then other people get to say their part.
Not to mention, “freedom of speech” only applies to laws congress may make (even if they regularly ignore that). There is no “freedom of speech” law across the land that is some god-given right. Admins and mods are free to run their instances and communities as they wish; if you don’t like how they do it then you can leave. “Freeze peach” is always used by conservative snowflakes to cry about having their opinions called reprehensible.
Just because that’s what the USA first amendment regulates, it does not mean that is what the concept itself is.
Personally attacking OP with strawmen accusations for calling out the platform for being hostile toward differing views is peak irony.
OP’s snarky reference to free speech is hypocritical on its face. The entire thesis of their post is to attack criticism, and criticism is a form of free speech.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not a strawman.
You’re not accurately representing their view neither. At no point have they taken issue with criticism.
This whole post is about OP taking issue with criticism.
No, it’s not - it’s about the seeming inability to disagree politely.
The opposite of strawmanning is steelmanning. It’s when you recite a person’s view back to them in a way that they agree is exactly what they think. Only after that do you move on to actually discussing the disagreement - now that you’re both on the same page instead of talking past each other.
I highly doubt OP would agree with your “steelmanning” of what they said.
Yes, I was never attempting to steelman OP’s argument. I was pointing out the flaws of the argument as it is given.
Steelmanning is a tool that is helpful in many situations, but that does not mean it is useful in every situation. Perhaps there is an ideal version of OP’s argument, a steelman, that I would agree with. But the actual argument that OP laid out is not ideal, it is hypocritical, and I am pointing that out.
A student who gets a poor grade on a paper does not get to go to the professor and ask them to “steelman” their argument for a better grade. The paper is judged as it is written.
No, you were just pointing out the flaws in your strawman interpretation of their argument.
Steelmanning doesn’t mean making their argument better for them or “giving them the benefit of the doubt.” It means making sure you’ve actually understood their point correctly before you start explaining why you disagree. If you can’t steelman your opponent’s view, then by definition you can’t argue against it either - because you haven’t grasped what claim you’re even trying to counter in the first place.
Oh, okay, this is just a rehash of the old civility police bullshit.
There is am entire spectrum of opinion that on it’s face does not deserve civility.
Pretending like it does is the same thing as a cop detaining you and asking for your ID do they can know who their talking to and saying “why are you being rude? I was being polite”
So, fuck off with your tone police bullshit.
You want civil replies? Express civil opinions.
No, you don’t understand. When they do it it’s good, when you do it, it’s bad!
Dont know how you got this impression but i think people are quite civil here. I guess people here have the tendency to be more left leaning. I guess if your opinions dont align with that i can imagine that a lot of people will disagree with you. But i guess this is the “curious about our differences” you talk about. They state their differences after you stated yours.
I’m a conservative and lemmy is still more welcoming and civil than reddit ever was.
I have questions about you being conservative. You seem too rational.
I can’t help but be curious, what made you choose slrpnk.net - an instance for environmentalist anarchists - as a conservative? Did you misread conservationism or something?
I chose it because I’m a conservationist myself and interested in topics like human-powered transit, homegrowing food crops, and fighting climate change. I personally think that environmental conservation and education are the two most important political issues, because those are the ones that will determine our future. Frustratingly, it’s been a rough couple decades policy-wise for both here in the US.
I have had some very interesting conversations and learned a lot about anarchism in my time here, I will say. And while I still think that anarchism as a political philosophy requires a certain amount of naïvety regarding human nature, there’s much about it to be admired as well, especially at a hyperlocal scale.
The stupid karma scoring system doesn’t help matters. When Lemmy and the Fediverse began, I was hopeful that we’d be rid of such things. Sadly, people feel we need to still have them and look where that has gotten us. Are you trying to be Reddit or not trying to be Reddit? Because if you’re aiming for the latter, you’ve fundamentally failed.
I hear so many excuses why we have scoring systems, but none of them add up. People will upvote anything they feel fits their world view and downvote things they feel doesn’t. It creates artificial engagement. It does nothing for the ecosystem as a whole.
There are instances (such as mine) which have downvoting disabled, which helps somewhat.
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Problem is you are now in an echo chamber of left wing hate. Oi course the hate of the left wing is different form right wing - but just at evil
That is something (too) many will not be willing to hear. See my other comments: they’ve been educated in wanting that echo chamber more than anything else.
Changing that will take hard work and, even worse in our days and age, a lot of patience as it won’t happen overnight, not even in a single generation’s span…
far right: we’re gonna exterminate entire social groups because they’re impure
far left: we’re gonna get everyone’s basic needs met, and do everything possible (including violence) to stop the far right from exterminating anyone.
You: I literally cannot tell you two apart
Incredible, thank you for sharing.
You really have bought into the echo chamber if you believe that.
There are bad people on both the right and left wing. However the majority on either side are not bad. Most (on both sides) have not thought deeply about the effects of if their ideas really were done in the real world. (A few have and have decided the downsides are worth accepting, but if you are not aware of the downsides and intentionally accepting of those as the least bad compromise you are part of the problem) We can disagree on which downsides are not bad enough to ignore - but everything has downsides.
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passionate is a polite way to acknowledge that they have delusional beliefs and inability to knowledge reality outside of their own head where anything they claim or think is perfect and good.
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I am only intolerant of intolerance.
If you’re saying intolerant bullshit, you don’t belong in human society.
The other day a guy posted a question about what AI is people using the most and it was downvoted to hell and piled on on the comments. Just because he asked a question. I get AI hate but people are shit
I don’t agree with the comment pile on, but downvoting content you don’t think fits in a community is exactly what that’s supposed to be used for.
It is fine to do both. If you have a point to make that hasn’t been made about a subject, you are allowed to make it.
But people should know that commenting on something should add something to the conversation, otherwise you should indeed just use your up votes. Like how supreme court uses concurrences. “I agree, but for different reasons.”
it’s giving a chatbot, your pfp is genai slop, and by now i think you’ve been reliably informed that fedi in general is generally anti-ai. there is a couple of very good reasons why things are this way. if you don’t like this, you are free to fuck off to linkedin, lobsters, hn or some other corporate hellhole
fedi in general is generally anti-ai
There are some very loud people who are anti-ai, but there are also subs like !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com that have over 5k subscribers.
This is the thing I like least about Lemmy. So many people have no friends or life experience, hate everyone, and want to constantly argue or insult others that it’s difficult to avoid them. I block as many as I can, but it takes a lot of the fun out of meeting people and having discussions.
Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with….
Nothing here has anything to do with freedom of speech.
